Foes say Google got slap on the wrist

Google earned about $38 billion in revenue last year, but the only penalty it's faced in the United States in connection with its Wi-Spy scandal is a mere $25,000 fine.

Some say the penalty, issued for obstructing the investigation and not for violating the law, is a slap on the wrist — too small of a price to pay for collecting troves of personal information from citizens' home networks.

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"The federal government ought to be asking more questions and seeking more answers," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who served as Connecticut's attorney general when his state and others began investigating the incident in 2010.

The senator told POLITICO on Sunday that there "needs to be some oversight" — not just over how and why Google collected the data, but why federal regulators didn't pursue the matter more aggressively.

The FCC failed to conclude in an order published Saturday that Google violated federal anti-eavesdropping laws when its Street View mapping cars inadvertently intercepted data transmitted over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. But the agency did lambaste Google in a scathing, 25-page order for delaying and obstructing its investigation.

The commission alleged that Google failed to comply with repeated requests for information and access to employees. One key Google engineer even took the Fifth to avoid being deposed. The company also balked at searching its own employee emails, claiming it “would be a time-consuming and burdensome task.”

All that cost Google, however, was a $25,000 fine.

But it doesn't mean it's over: The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy group that filed an initial FCC complaint over Street View, said it plans to raise the issue with the Department of Justice, as well as with the members of Congress that oversee the agency.

"The inside-Washington view, of course, is that Google exercises disproportionate influence with the regulatory agencies," said EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg. "But I don't think the game is over here."

While the FCC inquiry is effectively finished, others are still investigating the privacy flap. A collection of state attorneys general hasn’t completed an inquiry, which also began in 2010. And a few members of Congress said this weekend that they expect to take a second look at an incident that has been brought up before at congressional hearings and has previously prompted some lawmakers to write letters critical of the company.

The Street View controversy has haunted Google since 2010, particularly in countries that had always been skeptical of the Big Brother nature of its plans to map the globe. Google has always maintained the data collection was a mistake made as it tried to track down Wi-Fi networks, in part to help new location-based services on smartphones. The company has stressed repeatedly that it kept the data at the request of international regulators, and has never used it.

Reviews in Canada, France and the Netherlands found Google violated privacy laws. In Washington, the FTC conducted its own inquiry. While regulators there criticized Google for its actions, the agency still concluded in 2010 it lacked the authority to do anything about it — a decision that troubled some privacy hawks.

The FCC review, meanwhile, began in 2010. A top agency official even wrote on the FCC's blog that the Street View mishap "clearly infringes on consumer privacy." But an FCC official told POLITICO that a key obstacle in its review of the Street View flap is the dated nature of the relevant laws, as well as a lack of clear precedent on how they apply to Wi-Fi networks. The Wiretap Act originated at a time when the primary concern was tapping of landline telephones.